The clip we were provided from the show Shameless was rather chaotic and crowded, there’s no disputing that. There’s tons you could analyze and discuss, especially in regard to the continuity of the scene. The stuff that stuck out to me the most would probably be the use of the milk as a visual anchor to give the scene something to center around and bring some structure to this visual cluster. The fact that most of the shots have the milk in the shot brings some consistency, which is a very good thing to keep the chaos from getting overwhelming, especially for folks like me who can sometimes suffer from sensory overload. It’s also an example of continuity between shots, showing what is being done with it and how each shot of it is progressing from the last.

The ending sequence in Steven Spielburg’s Duel is a good example of editing for continuity, which I’d like to break down for this blog. The shots are all kept focused on and don’t deviate from the general environment of the crash, that being the desert cliffside. Even as it’s cutting between shots of the truck, the main character, and so forth, it all remains the same location and it’s obvious when looking at the shots. With the continuity maintained, the scene has the space needed to let its climax play out. Notably, the shots of the truck tumbling down the cliff, getting decimated, the shots are frequently of a larger scale, with many wide shots and long shots. Meanwhile, many of the shots showing the main character often being close-up or medium shots. It helps to emphasize the scale of each perspective, with the scale of the main character in that space being rather narrow while the scale of the truck and its destruction was rather large. It helps bring continuity to the work by keeping the backdrop and the scale consistent with each perspective.

Hello class!

So for this blog post, I have to propose my story and visual evidence for making a short documentary about the COVID experience for local nurses. My one caveat is that I’m not allowed into their hospitals with a camera. So what am I to do to gather extra footage so that the documentary isn’t just looking at the interviewed nurses from different angles for 10-20 minutes?

This is quite the challenge, as this means I cannot follow the nurses through a daily routine at work to help accentuate their words. But that wouldn’t provide much anyways, as according to the articles, that would probably be considered more as “B-Roll” instead of “Visual Evidence”.

As the article says, “B-roll is cover footage, pictures that run while someone is talking” (“B-Roll”, pg. 106). While visual evidence is more an example of telling a story with exclusively footage. Silent films are a great example of visual evidence, because, well, they didn’t have a choice. They were forced to use visual evidence because they weren’t able to use audio.

So with this knowledge, I can use my footage to help tell the story that the nurses give me. For example, I can film the nurses preparing for a day at work instead them actually working. A shot of the nurse rubbing down her scrubs can help paint the image of working a lot and staying dedicated throughout the cause. In addition, I would probably see if some local patients who were saved by the nurses could arrange a party with the nurses that they helped, as a chance to thank them for all of their hard work. There is a lot of potential with this type of footage, as it allows us to not only show examples of the grueling work they went through, but also the impact they had on their community and how much they did to save so many lives.

-Jeremy Sauter

This is a unique circumstance where traditional methods of gathering “Visual Evidence,” as described in the text, are not possible, thus a more robust strategy must be implemented. To start with, I would gather as much possible footage from outside the hospital as allowed, staff and individuals entering the building, ambulances arriving, and anything that would depict the nature of the hospital during the pandemic. To follow this, I would include interviews from at least 4-5 nurses if at all possible to ask about life in their occupation during such trying times. A quote from the text that really resonated with me was one from the very first page. That being “in a documentary about a protest march, there was a shot of a cold-looking police officer standing by a police barrier. Behind him was a completely empty street. The narrator said, “Twenty thousand people took to the street in protest … ” But the visual evidence said nobody was there. Imagine if the voice had come from an interview rather than from the narrator.” This very long quote from the text goes on to conclude that the viewer would think the person being interviewed was lying since the visual evidence contradicted what the person would be saying. Therefore, it is important to consider what visual evidence is being presented to the viewer and whether or not it matches the audio the viewer is hearing. Going with that, depending on what responses I would get from the nurse interviews, I would do my best to get footage that best fits the verbal responses given. If someone describes budget cuts effecting hospital operations, perhaps getting some footage of damaged windows or cracked concrete on the hospital campus would help visualize that particular problem. This is the overall methodology I would use when creating this short documentary.

Works Cited:

Visual Evidence, A/B Roll Editing” and “A Short Sermon about Interviews” 

Circles

For this post I decided to chose the Poof AI short film. At first glance I didn’t quite know what this film was going to be about, I saw a standard  office like building and didn’t think too much of it. I noticed there was very little color and the quality wasn’t great. As it transitioned to the inside of the building I got more invested, there was more color and personally whenever I am watching anything that is what catches my attention first. It then gets into the main overall topic of the film which is the characters.

This film uses muppet like characters to portray real people and what an office environment consists of. Within the film there is no talking between characters but rather they are just doing their office tasks like typing and printing. They’re facial expressions stay pretty consistent the entire time with this look of boredom and exhaustion. Towards the end they begin to explode and nothing is left but their furry bodies.

The bright colors of the characters and the bland background have a great contrast between each other making it pretty apparent that the characters are AI generated.  The sound affects are also a major giveaway to the use of AI as they are exaggerated and cartoon like.  Overall, there are many components that play into the AI components of this short film.